This article re-examines the history of NATO’s original post-Cold War enlargement to include the Visegrad states of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. It uses both published materials and the author’s new interviews with key US and Russian policymakers, and employs robust qualitative counterfactual methods to ask two questions: whether there were any realistic alternatives to NATO enlargement, and whether NATO enlargement was responsible for the downturn in Russian relations with the West. It concludes that domestic politics were the dominant factors explaining policy directions on both the US and Russian sides; that NATO enlargement was probably inevitable given US domestic political factors and West European acquiescence; that Russia’s turn against the West preceded the NATO expansion discussion in the US; that the tenor of the Russian turn is explained by status concerns rather than military threat perceptions, and that it was aggravated most by Western unilateral airstrikes rather than NATO’s geographical enlargement; and that the one policy initiative that might have realistically slowed NATO enlargement if it had been adopted differently, Partnership for Peace, did not affect those Russian status concerns and thus could not have redirected the relationship.

中文翻译：

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重新考虑北约的扩张：对 1990 年代俄罗斯和西方的反事实分析

本文重新审视了北约在冷战后最初的扩张历史，包括波兰、匈牙利和捷克共和国的维谢格拉德州。它使用已发表的材料和作者对美国和俄罗斯主要政策制定者的新采访，并采用强有力的定性反事实方法来提出两个问题：北约扩大是否有任何现实的替代方案，以及北约扩大是否是导致俄罗斯关系下滑的原因与西方。得出的结论是，国内政治是解释美俄双方政策方向的主导因素；鉴于美国国内政治因素和西欧的默许，北约扩大可能是不可避免的；俄罗斯对西方的转向先于美国的北约扩张讨论；俄罗斯转向的基调是由地位担忧而非军事威胁感知来解释的，西方单方面空袭而不是北约的地域扩张使情况更加恶化；并且如果采取不同的方式，可能实际上减缓北约扩大的一项政策倡议，即和平伙伴关系，并没有影响俄罗斯的地位问题，因此不可能改变这种关系。